LFG

For a while now I’ve been trying to apply my knowledge of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG; Kaplan & Bresnan 1982; most recently Dalrymple 2023; for a quick overview, see e.g. Müller 2023: 223–246; Belyaev 2023a) to Toki Pona (Lang 2014; 2021) in order to analyze its constituent structure. LFG’s constraint-based approach seems like an overall useful way to describe syntactic structures, even in a totally isolating language like Toki Pona. Especially the fact that Toki Pona all but lacks morphology makes this a nice brain-teaser. You can find the working draft of what’s by now grown into a whole treatise on Codeberg. And while I’ve come pretty far since I started this project during the 2024/25 Christmas break, the construction usually referred to as a “la phrase” keeps bothering me in the back of my mind. So let me explain in order to sort out my own thoughts. ...